Polite Dissent

9 Responses to “ Generation M #5: A Medical Review ”

1. Zzedar
   May 6th, 2006 at 7:26 pm
   

   My understanding (and I’m not a chemist, so take this with a grain of salt) is that “lithium dioxide” is an incorrect version of the name, used by battery advertisers who don’t want to explain what a superoxide is, and “superoxide” is the version used by chemists. You know, like “dihydrogen oxide” and “hydrogen hydroxide.”

2. lilacsigil
   May 6th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
   

   They’re changing her batteries to restart her clock? Minnie does have a chronological problem…

3. Philip
   May 7th, 2006 at 10:10 am
   

   Zzedar’s right. Also, any kind of superoxide is a *very* powerful oxidising agent and really not something you want inside a human body.

4. W
   May 7th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
   

   I’ve always thought that for oxide, each oxygen has oxidation number -2, and for superoxide, it is O2 with the total oxidation number of the polyatomic ion being -1. And a peroxide is O2 with total oxidation number beig -2, or each oxygen is -1.

5. Zzedar
   May 7th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
   

   Okay, I’ve done some research, and apparently I was wrong. When they talk about “lithium dioxide” batteries, they don’t mean that the batteries are based on lithium dioxide. They mean that the anode of a battery cell is metallic lithium, and the cathode is some dioxide, usually manganese.

6. Zzedar
   May 7th, 2006 at 9:31 pm
   

   Incidentally, the “Lithium carbonate” link in the main post is broken.

7. Scott
   May 7th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
   Official Comment

   Thanks, Zzedar, Philip.

   I figured it was something like that. Links fixed too.

8. Kalinara
   May 8th, 2006 at 5:08 am
   

   I think W’s right. If I recall the chemistry class I barely passed last semester, it has to do with the ioncharge. A normal oxide has a charge of -2. Since Oxygen’s normal state is O2, that means the charge would be -4. Peroxide’s also o2, but the charge is -2 for the whole thing. Each Oxygen atom has a charge of -1. A superoxide is even more positively charged,an O2 molecule has a total charge of -1. So each atom has a charge of -1/2 I guess.

   I have no idea what this means in practical terms (barely passed means *barely passed*) but that’s what my text book said…

9. Philip
   May 8th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
   

   So each atom has a charge of -1/2 I guess.

   Not really. They probably don’t tell you this unless you’re doing a full chemistry degree, but in reality *all* electrons in the outer orbitals of atoms bonded together in a molecule are shared to some degree between all the atoms, and the charge gets smeared out across the whole superoxide anion.

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